Brian Eno releases first track from ‘Top Boy’ score
Brian Eno has unveiled ‘Cutting Room I’, a new, unheard track from his soundtrack for Netflix’s Top Boy. Netflix will also release a collection of Eno’s recordings for the soundtrack as Top Boy (Score From the Original Series) on physical and digital formats.
The digital release comes ahead of the final season of the British crime drama, which launches on Thursday, September 7th. The album will compile Eno’s compositions from across the series’ five seasons, including two tracks that were cut from the series, ‘Cutting Room I’ and ‘Cutting Room II’.
Excluding two tracks which Eno included on Film Music 1976-2020, three years ago, the album marks the first time the compositions have been available to the public.
Eno spoke about the experience of working on the music for Top Boy, sharing: “From the beginning of Top Boy, I was given the freedom to work in the way I prefer, making music and atmospheres and then giving it to the filmmakers to use as they saw fit. I try to absorb the idea of what a piece is about, and from that, I produce a lot of music and say, ‘Here it is. Use it as you wish.'”
He continued to explain his process of honing the show’s sound, explaining: “If you’d been scoring it in the conventional Hollywood way, the temptation would be to up the excitement factor, up the danger factor, all the time. But Top Boy is really about children in a pretty bad situation. So I explored the internal world of the children, not just what’s happening to them in the external world. Quite a lot of the music was deliberately naive, it was sort of simple. The melodies were simple, not really sophisticated, or grown-up.”
Charles Steel and Alasdair Flind from Cowboy Films added: “From the moment Brian started delivering his initial sections of music for the very first Top Boy season in 2011, we understood what a rare gift to the show his score would be… Based on his understanding of the show and his feel for the people that inhabit the world in which the show is set, Brian has continued to serve up a selection of music across five seasons, always taking the audience far beyond the plot.”
They concluded, “Like Dushane and Sully, and like the streets of London, Brian’s music has become a core foundation of what Top Boy is.”
The soundtrack will be released digitally on Friday, September 1st and on vinyl and CD on Friday, September 29th.
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